Patches laughed bitterly.  “I have my hands full now.”

The next morning the foreman said that he would give that day to the horses he was training, and sent Patches, alone, after the saddle and bridle which they had left near the scene of the accident.

“You can’t miss finding the place again,” he said to Patches; “just follow up the wash.  You’ll be back by noon—­if you don’t try any experiments,” he added laughing.

Patches had ridden as far as the spot where he and Phil had met the Tailholt Mountain men, and was thirsty.  He thought of the distance he had yet to go, and then of the return back to the ranch, in the heat of the day.  He remembered that Phil had told him, as they were riding out the morning before, of a spring a little way up the small side canyon that opens into the main wash through that break in the ridge.  For a moment he hesitated; then he turned aside, determined to find the water.

Riding perhaps two hundred yards into that narrow gap In the ridge, he found the way suddenly becoming steep and roughly strewn with boulders, and, thinking to make better time, left his horse tied to a bush in the shadow of the rocky wall, while he climbed up the dry watercourse on foot.  He found, as Phil had said, that it was not far.  Another hundred yards up the boulder-strewn break in the ridge, and he came out into a beautiful glade, where he found the spring, clear and cold, under a moss-grown rock, in the deep shade of an old gnarled and twisted cedar.  Gratefully he threw himself down and drank long and deep; then sat for a few moments’ rest, before making his way back to his horse.  The moist, black earth of the cuplike hollow was roughly trampled by the cattle that knew the spot, and there were well-marked trails leading down through the heavy growth of brush and trees that clothed the hillsides.  So dense was this forest growth, and so narrow the glade, that the sunlight only reached the cool retreat through a network of leaves and branches, in ever-shifting spots and bars of brightness.  Nor could one see very far through the living screens.

Patches was on the point of going, when he heard voices and the sound of horses’ feet somewhere above.  For a moment he sat silently listening.  Then he realized that the riders were approaching, down one of the cattle trails.  A moment more, and he thought he recognized one of the voices.  There was a low, murmuring, whining tone, and then a rough, heavy voice, raised seemingly in anger.  Patches felt sure, now, that he knew the speakers; and, obeying one of those impulses that so often prompted his actions, he slipped quietly into the dense growth on the side of the glade opposite the approaching riders.  He was scarcely hidden—­a hundred feet or so from the spring—­when Nick Cambert and Yavapai Joe rode into the glade.